Have we already been visited by aliens? | Hacker News Reader

Have we already been visited by aliens?

newyorker.com

240 pointselorant356 comments

> Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” So long as there’s a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, we’d be fools not to pursue the idea. “If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-technology origin,” he writes, “whole new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery open before us.”

Uh... this isn't at all clear to me. I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be, its just that it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens". Recall that the scientific community has gotten its hopes up about aliens several times in the past with scientist proffering alien explanations for "canals" on mars, pulsars, GRBs, and FRBs to name a few.

If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing?

Yea, the actual fallacy is thinking you must identify what something is before you have enough information. 1I/2017 U1 is an unknown object and that’s perfectly ok. It didn’t display any radio signals, unusual thrust, or extreme velocity requiring it to be an alien probe. But, that doesn’t prevent it from being a probe either.

Or even just a piece of debris of unnatural origin. I'm not saying that's what it is, or even is likely to be, but it's in the possibility space.

While it’s true that it didn’t produce any detectable radio signals, it have an unexplained force acting on it. It was this acceleration away from the sun that spawned the theories of undetected outgassing or light pressure. As for “extreme velocity”, that’s a bit a canard. It’s traveling at interstellar speeds, and humanity has already has five interstellar probes today. Now none of these indicate that it’s probe — working or otherwise — but these aren’t the reasons against it. (Well, no radio emissions is a reason against a working probe.)

The big unknown for me about the object is that we don’t actually have a good idea about its shape. Drawings show it has a cigar shaped rock, which is only one possible configuration compatible with the radio reflections. If only we could have actually seen the object, a lot of this uncertainty would have been eliminated.

I chose unusual as it had thrust consistent with comets.

After ruling out solar-radiation pressure, drag- and friction-like forces, interaction with solar wind for a highly magnetized object, and geometric effects originating from 'Oumuamua potentially being composed of several spatially separated bodies or having a pronounced offset between its photocentre and centre of mass, we find comet-like outgassing to be a physically viable explanation, provided that 'Oumuamua has thermal properties similar to comets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29950718/

PDF: https://csnbiology.org/rw_common/plugins/stacks/armadillo/me...

PS: At to extreme velocity, something large traveling 0.1+ c or even 0.01c is very likely to be aliens. This was fast, but a long way from those kind of speeds.

If you listen to his podcast with Lex he explains that the outgassing needed to give it the acceleration it had would require 10% of it's mass to cook off, as well as all of it had to be hydrogen else we'd have seen the trail. Why consider a comet made entirely of hydrogen more likely than an alien probe?

The paper addresses that point.

The model predictions for the magnitude and temporal evolution of the non-gravitational acceleration are within a factor of about 2–3 of the observations (see Methods) for a water production rate of QH2O = 4.9 × 1025 molecules s−1 (or 1.5 kg s−1) near 1.4 au and an addi- tional contribution from QCO = 4.5 × 1025 molecules s−1 (or 2.1 kg s−1). Outgassing at this level does not conflict with the absence of spectro- scopic detections for outgassing of OH, because the values quoted are well below the spectroscopic limits on production rates16. However, the inferred upper limits for water production at 1.4 au, which are based on the non-detection of CN7 and assumed Solar System abundances for QCN/QOH17, show that ‘Oumuamua would need to be substantially depleted in CN (by a factor of more than about 15) relative to water.

And:

However, if the grains are predominantly larger than a few hundred micrometres to millimetres, they would not have been detected at optical wavelengths (see Methods). In the Solar System, comet 2P/Encke is noteworthy for its lack of small dust near perihelion18. Cometary behaviour implies that ‘Oumuamua must have some internal strength, at least comparable to Solar System comets19, because asteroid-like densities are ruled out (see Methods).

It’s an interesting read, suggesting interstellar space as being significantly different than what you see inside solar systems.

> I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be.

Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career.

As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect oxygen on exoplanets, which is not conclusive evidence of life, but to search for industrial pollution is a non starter for exactly this reason. But that would yield much more interesting results (both for negative and positive results.)

Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.

Yet we find this to be a recurring theme, I wonder when this switch happens. From a curious boy/girl who becomes a scientist to a conservative.

Grad school.

Reinforced repeatedly with career/publication steps, homeownership, children's expenses, neighbor buying a Tesla first, etc.

This is very common in science. New theories are usually rejected and ridiculed until/if they develop enough evidence behind them to sway people.

Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades.

Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded as a species, we'd make faster progress and better ideas would win out more often. This is as much true in society at large, or business, as it is in science.

The most recent event that comes to my mind is the lead up to the discovery of H. pylori causing gastric ulcers.

Tectonic plates was another big one.

This is a current fun topic with some controversy related to tectonic plates: do solar flares cause earthquakes?

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/07/powerful-eruptions-on-the...

Despite being a really stupid-sounding premise, that is actually kind of interesting.

Peoples position on that one shifted very slowly.

sir, may I see your dad license please?

It’s not his fault that the joke was dad-worthy.

But when they did shift, it was a...

Yeah that's a good one.

Another is recommending trans-fat based margarine over butter. That was counter-productive health advice that took decades to reverse - even although the evidence it was based on was extremely flimsy.

Once the group-think machine gets going in a direction, it has a tremendous amount of inertia.

>That was counter-productive health advice that took decades to reverse - even although the evidence it was based on was extremely flimsy.

I think this was more a case of lobbying by certain agricultural producers than ignorance. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14823257_Food_Lobbi...

True, but the point still stands: a lot of people can be influenced by something no matter its origins. Once they can say "X thousand can't be wrong" then you and your pesky idea backed up by facts and evidence can go to hell.

Sadly history is full of such occurrences.

Append Ignaz Semmelweis to this important list, which is a plump one.

Another: Many World's Interpretation of QM. Not known to be true but less ridiculed and more widely subscribed.

The inventor of the COVID mRNA vaccine was fired from her tenure position because UPenn thought the idea wouldn't work.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfi...

And they are careerist...

My Post-doc colleague during my PhD@MIT was explaining this trick he does to get his system working that he never publishes (one very small step of 100 steps). He was concerned that if he published the step, it would hurt his chances at getting a professorship.

It’s exactly the same logic behind why code is not published.

Because ethically you can ‘hand wave it away’ as obvious to other experts and not worth publishing.

How can you be a post-doc without publishing?

I read that as, one step of his experimental procedure isn't published.

I think what was meant could be described by a joke: "professor writes a theorem proof on 6 pages, removes pages 3 and 4 and writes 'trivially leads to'"

It's not just science, I can think of an example from pure mathematics. Cantor's work showing the uncountability of the real numbers was derided by prominent members of the mathematical community for decades. This despite the fact that he was able to boil down his argument into a proof so simple it's taught in introductory undergraduate classes. Now, this was at a time when mathematicians were still trying to rigorously define set theory and ground mathematics on a foundation of logic, but still it's a relatively simple and understandable proof. I think the moral of the story is that people are stubborn and are capable of disagreeing about just about everything.

Bad example. Cantor's theory is controversial to this day.

"Classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets …. Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of Cantor's set theory."

-- Hermann Weyl

I wouldn't really consider Weyl as an example of a modern day critic, considering he died in 1955. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a modern mathematician that rejects the diagonalization argument, outside of finitists, which are pretty far from the mainstream. I mean the proof that there is no bijection from a set to its power set is pretty straightforward and constructive. I'm pretty sure the proof is valid even in intuitionist logic.

By whom? Almost all mainstream mathematicians rightfully lionize Cantor's main contributions, as David Hilbert so eloquently put it: "No one shall expel us from the paradise Cantor has created for us" Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können

Cantor proved that R, the set of all reals, cannot be countable. That was never controversial. What's controversial is claiming that R (or any uncountable set) exists, as no one has rigorously proved without adding an axiom.

What axiom do you have to add, are you talking about the axiom of infinity, defining the set of natural numbers? Because you do need that, but without that wouldn't even be able to define uncountability. After that, you can define the reals using Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences, which was known at the time (I believe Cantor actually worked on the Cauchy sequence construction). But there's an even simpler uncountable set: the power set of the natural numbers. Super easy to define, and the diagonalization argument falls right out.

To construct R you need to repeat Dedekind cut uncountable number of times, i.e. you need to iterate over all real numbers, which would make them countable.

You don't need any sort of "repetition" of Dedekind cuts to construct the real numbers, it's actually fairly straightforward. The set of all Dedekind cuts is a subset of the power set of rational numbers (i.e. each Dedekind cut is a set of rational numbers) satisfying the following properties: for each Dedekind cut A

1. A is not the empty set

2. A is not the set of all rational numbers

3. A is closed downwards, meaning if x is in A and y < x, then y is in A

4. A has no greatest element, meaning for all x in A, there is a y in A such that y > x.

And each Dedekind cut is in one-to-one correspondence with a real number. You can define the usual arithmetic operations on them, show that every rational number has a corresponding Dedekind cut (for any rational q, we have {x in Q | y < q } as the corresponding cut). I haven't seen a proof of the uncountability of Dedekind cuts using the diagonalization argument, but you can prove there is a one-to-one correspondence between Dedekind cuts and Cauchy sequences of rational numbers, which is another construction of the reals. And there is a fairly straightforward proof that those are uncountable using diagonalization.

But as you can see, you don't need any sort of repetition to do the construction, it's just a set of sets of rational numbers satisfying a few simple properties. For more information, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_numbe...

So you just assume that the set exists.

Well I assume the set of natural numbers exist, by the axiom of infinity. From there you can construct the set of rationals. And you can construct the power set of the set of rationals, by the axiom of the power set. And the set of all Dedekind cuts is a subset of the power set of rationals satisfying those properties listed above, which we can construct by the axiom schema of separation. All of this is Zermelo-Frankel set theory, don't even need the axiom of choice.

Bretz defended his theories, and this kicked off an acrimonious 40-year debate over the origin of the Scablands. Both Pardee and Bretz continued their research over the next 30 years, collecting and analyzing evidence that led them to identify Lake Missoula as the source of the Spokane flood and creator of the channeled scablands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods

Also Plate Tectonics...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_development_of...

Time to break out Thomas Kuhn.

Ah, but my sister always says I’m not open-minded because I won’t read all her antivaxer info. If we give all ideas equal credence, better ideas will not win out.

I think antivax claims have been given equal credence, they've just been found false.

A better example is that equal time is frequently given to both sides of the climate change debate despite the actually numbers showing that calling it a "debate" is journalistic laziness. Equal credence would mean the deniers only get about 3% of the allotted time to make their crackpot case, because that's the closest they come to being a "side" in this non-debate against the other 93% that also have 100% of the data and research.

It's like spam in a decentralized system. Attackers can't change consensus within the system but they can slow it down to a crawl. Proof of work in Bitcoin is just an anti spam mechanism.

I'm not suggesting that being open minded requires giving all ideas equal credence, that's a strawman. Just that us humans tend to have strongly held opinions that are wrong far too often - like your sister in this case. If she was more open minded about her own beliefs that would be beneficial.

Your sister grew up with you and went through the same schooling as you.

Doesn't she deserve to be heard? By labeling her a antivaxer and ignoring her based on that label you effectively are closing your mind to her.

This is a good thing. If we entertained every crackpot theory we would waste tons of time. it's good for there to be some gatekeeping. Of course sometimes they're wrong - but so what? That will come out if there is actual evidence.

There is a balance here, you are correct, but I think we currently skew too far toward gatekeeping.

Too little gatekeeping means trouble finding the signal through the noise and time wasted on dead ends. Too much and good ideas get neglected or squashed for far too long. There is a cost to both.

There's another aspect - with strong gatekeeping it is assumed that those theories that make it through are true.

Not really, they often are simply in tune and in agreement with the currently established group-think.

Unfortunately, gatekeeping is essential to academia. Ask anyone who wants to publish a finding independently, or read a paper for free without being associated with an institution. Heck, ask the undergrads who paid tens of thousands of dollars for Zoom classes that have MOOC alternatives alternatives.

> Too little gatekeeping means trouble finding the signal through the noise and time wasted on dead ends.

Much time is supposed to be spent on dead ends anyway. That's the way the corpus matures, not to mention an inevitable result of peer review (no need to review anything if all the research product is perfect). Research is a search; imagine running BFS without expecting to encounter dead ends.

On one hand, this is because it's such a safe thing to cause damage to the image of another fellow scientist that happens to dare looking at something new or in a new way. (Crab mentality, perhaps?) If this effect would be as costly to the individual attacker as it is for the collective, we would probably "move fast and break things" more. On the other hand, we already have way too many non peer-reviewed papers as it is, and those papers get cited by other papers, and so on. Not enough action to ensure quality. In such case, what the critiques with good intentions for the world but with limited time and attention are to do but go after the most audacious claims in their field?

> I think if we could get better at being open-minded as a species, we'd make faster progress and better ideas would win out more often.

Given the current scenario we are certainly not sure if we are ever going to achieve it! Though that achievement can work wonders. Any thoughts how you see that change can be made possible?

Yes, it is. And it has also been happening for the whole history of anything recognizable as "science."

The nice, pretty scientific method we learn about in school is largely an idealized myth

"Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis" => chopping the legs out from under a competitor because they stepped in something taboo.

Happens all the time. Academia is a snake pit and this is low hanging fruit.

> Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.

Your statement is self-referential. If a hypothesis is "plausible" than practically by definition it is above ridicule. But how do you decide which hypotheses are plausible?

Science, at its core, is a social system. One of the key goals of that system is prioritization. There are finite research resources and it's important to allocate them to the most promising areas. Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible.

Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible.

It is also a very sinister and discrediting tool. As an example the CRU employed this tactic and set an entire area of scientific research back due to the optics of scientific politics. It can cause the tainted smell of agenda, and that is never good for enlightening people.

> It is also a very sinister and discrediting tool.

Agreed, but self-aggrandizement, manipulation, and outright fraud are also tools in the toolbox and if you don't have strong enough defensive tools, you are open to attacks from those. Obviously, they can be misapplied. Humans are not perfect. But without powerful social tools like ridicule and shunning, science becomes essentially a honeypot for charlatans like Andrew Wakefield.

Happens all the time. People's ideas get ignored even when they have evidence backing them up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

> Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community.

> He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it.

Medical doctors and surgeons are not scientists. They don't do research, they don't publish papers. Medical research is an entirely different field which overlaps in skills sometimes.

But MDs are more like mechanics for the human body.

Many doctors publish research. Is that not science?

The point is that there's a difference between medical doctors as a profession, and medical doctors by training engaged in research.

It's not a homogenous demographic, and it doesn't have a substantial overlap. So there is a very large (super-majority) of medical doctors who have absolutely no training in research, statistics etc. Because it's not what they do - they are not scientists. Their training is about their obligations to follow current developments in best practice, drug prescriptions etc. (or the same but for surgical technique) and apply it. They do not do science, they don't even necessarily particularly understand the scientific method.

So it is absolutely incorrect to imply that all medical professionals are "the scientific community". They're not. Those which participate in and publish research are but that is not even a significant fraction of their population.

Comparisons about what general population surgeons and medical doctors historically reacted to changes in practice does not say anything about the idea that these people represent a peer-reviewed scientific consensus, because they didn't. They represent the equivalent of a mechanic rejecting manufacturer recommendations on fuel quality and complaining about it to their colleagues.

I thought the idea of searching for industrial pollution was actually a pretty bad one. We've been polluting at detectable levels for just ~100 years. And if we keep doing it we'll likely wipe us out in a few hundred more. Overall it seems very likely industrial pollution is a very short-lived phase of any civilizations, so chances of detecting this signature are tiny.

Pollution capable of completely killing the dominant species of a planet would last a long time after the creation of that pollution ended.

The pollution would vastly outlive the polluters, so it would be detectable for some time after their demise, especially if anything they automated also polluted. That stuff would continue to pollute after its creators all died, at least a bit.

Also, it seems that the chance of detecting pollution would increase linearly as we continue to discover more planets.

The phrases "a long time", "some time", and "at least a bit" are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Oxygen has been in the Earth's atmosphere for over 2 billion years. How long, roughly, is "some time"?

How big, roughly is the planet in question? How thick, roughly, is the atmosphere? What, roughly, is the composition of the atmosphere? What is the median temperature of the planet? List all species capable of metabolizing pollution back into harmless compounds. What are their lifespans? How do they reproduce?

...hopefully my point is made, now. I can't give details because they don't exist.

If a species produces sufficient pollution that it kills that species, it is a reasonable assumption that it was also produced at a rate far higher than the planets natural ecosystem could absorb it. It is also reasonable that the pollution also kills one or more species which were consuming or absorbing the pollution, slowing the rate at which it can be removed, or maybe even stopping that process completely. Pollution does not disappear at the same time pollutants stop being introduced into the atmosphere.

There will be a time after which no pollutants are produced and before no pollutants are detectable. That is a non-zero amount of time. That is why I say that pollution could one day be detected on a planet that has not had a living civilization for "a long time." "A long time" being "more than five minutes" if you really want me to nail it down.

> I can't give details because they don't exist.

Right. And if the argument depends on those details, then it's not a very convincing argument.

My argument is that pollution outlives a society that it kills by a non-zero amount of time.

I understand. And my argument is that nonzero isn't a good enough lower bound to justify investing in something like that. Oxygen is produced by even very simple organisms, and thus has been present in our atmosphere in significant concentrations for billions of years, currently makes up 20+ percent, and its residence time is 4,500 years [1]. On the other hand, many CFC concentrations are measured in parts per trillion, and have a residence time measured in years or decades [2], and have only existed at all for a century or so at most. Even if every single living thing on this earth died tomorrow, oxygen would be detectible long, long after many pollutants were gone. And chances are, if anything were to survive the kind of disaster that would wipe out humanity, it would be something like the single-celled organisms that excrete oxygen. I'm prepared to believe that you're correct, but you have to present some more compelling evidence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_cycle#Capacities_and_fl...

[2] https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html

I thought this might be the case as well but at least for CFCs the lifespan without replenishment from human pollution is only about 140 years. so "a bit" for this particular circumstance is not very long at all in the eyes of the universe

CFCs are not the only pollutants.

An alien society may produce pollutants which last a million years. Plastics can last millions of years.

Sufficient pollution could cause climate change severe enough to keep all kinds of things airborne for who knows how long. We are constantly surprised by what we learn about other worlds. It is silly to me to presume that anything we know about Earth pollution will be a given on a planet from another star system.

I wish we could develop a technology to detect plastics across space.

Why would the pollution vastly outlive the polluters? It's not obvious to me. Mixing and recycling timescale of an atmosphere seem very short compared to other relevant timescales of the problem. Impactors, volcanic eruptions... the memory of the atmospheric impact of those events is in the sediments, not the air we breathe (e.g. KT boundary). Finally, civilizations that do not destroy themselves in the short-lived polluting era should move to a clean nuclear fusion era. We are probably ~50-100 yrs away if we don't fuck up.

If the pollution is severe enough to KILL the species creating it, it is already being produced far faster than nature can absorb it or counteract it. It also seems feasible that other species are killed as well; species which may have helped clean the pollution from the planet, which would slow the cleaning process or, if enough species die off, stopping the cleansing process almost entirely.

Pollution doesn't vanish when it isn't being made anymore.

So, if there is so much pollution that it both kills life on the planet, it will take a good amount of time (millions of years? How big of a planet are we talking about?) to be cleansed back to undetectable levels.

So far volcanic eruptions were the most dangerous for life.

I think that you might be right but it would be more conclusive as evidence than detecting just oxygen. CFCs are not something that occurs spontaneously in nature, so essentially if we did get a positive result it would be meaningful.

To your point getting strictly negative results would not necessarily mean anything one way or the other.

Yes, I agree with the point that Oxygen is not answering the question definitively. The issue is that say, you build a very, very expensive space telescope and you have to decide if you want it to look for Oxygen or CFC. CFC is a shot in the dark: likely you won't see anything (see my previous comment). Which means likely no data, no PhD thesis, nothing. You pretty much wasted a few billion dollars and you're not ruling out much because what if civilizations only use chemical energy sources for ~200 yrs, then they all switch to nuclear fusion? On the other hand is likely Oxygen will show up as a signature in some exoplanets, and a lot of new understanding about exoplanet atmosphere and geology would follow. Which, among many other things, might help us narrowing down planets where to look for life and how. And next iteration of instruments we might be able to really discover life. So this is why review panels do opt for choices that are more likely to benefit the scientific community at large. It might sound a bit incremental at first, but it's how progress is made. This said, it's not like astrophysicists are not thinking about detecting technosignatures in exoplanetary spectra, see e.g. 3.2 in https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2009.0371 and e.g. https://elib.dlr.de/119683/1/1803.05179.pdf

I believe that we've probably altered the geography of Earth to an extent that it would be trivially easy to determine from great distance that it was once inhabited by intelligent beings. Even if all of our cities are gone, the mineral deposits left behind would be so concentrated. Nevermind the nuclear endeavors.

We were able to detect dinosaurs on our own planet 65 million years after they went extinct, and they didn't even pollute anything.

I recommend Schmidt and Frank’s article on the Silurian hypothesis [1] for a surprisingly different take on this. The full text is on arXiv [2]. “We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record” – that is, the record we can observe from a distance of zero!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748

Yeah, look what happened to Tom Van Flandern.

This is ignoring the obvious question: what are we not doing that we should be with researching Oumuamua on that basis?

What concrete experiments would prove its an alien construct as opposed to being just interstellar rock?

The scientific community isn't rejecting proposals to find more Oumuamua like objects, and has been actively trying to figure out how we could intercept another one when it turns up.

So what exactly is requiring us to start from "it might be aliens" in order to get funded?

I only saw part of the Lex interview, and in the part I watched Loeb was saying if we had seen it on the way TOO Earth, we could have sent a rocket to investigate.

If we aren't looking, and a chance arises, we'll miss it, and if we do spot something like it early, what are the chances we are ready with a rocket to go look?

Would be nice if humanity could pre-plan. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/be... is a less controversial example.

But we are looking: there is enormous interest in discovering more interstellar objects. It's estimated there should be about ~1000 such objects in the solar system at any given time, and they all represent priceless data about the material composition of the universe outside of our solar system.

People weren't not looking for them, but by their nature no one knows a way to find them reliably (other then, find all the things, look for anything which has a hyperbolic trajectory relative to the sun).

Same problem with an intercept plan: we would like to do it, but the problem is not particularly tractable with our current space technology. Up until we saw Oumuamua we didn't even have a baseline for what we might expect the behaviour of objects to be - which is a problem when you're coming up with a propellant budget for a space mission, since you have no idea how much fuel or weight you can afford for an intercept.

As it stands, we probably need to see a couple more Oumuamua-like objects to develop a reasonable expectation of the frequency of different classes and come up with a mission-profile which we can reasonably expect we'd be able to launch at one in the next 20-40 years. Or a way of establishing a permanent capability (which is not focused research its "yes, let's build the lunar gateway station and develop a long-term La Grange point mode for the Starliner - which is also something which you'd do if you were colonizing Mars).

This is my point: nothing here benefits from "it was aliens" as a starting point. In fact, all of this useful work is pretty explicitly "it's probably not aliens". Because if aliens have gone to the expense and trouble to scout the solar system, then we basically don't need to do any of it - "it was aliens" closes research paths. If we're sure it's aliens, then a much more cost-effective strategy is waiting for them to send another probe that assuredly would move in to study the most interesting thing in Sol - us. Which will be much easier to see because we look closely for Earth-orbit objects.

It’s still possible to send a spacecraft in the coming years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_object#Hypothet...

> ... proffering alien explanations for "canals" on mars, pulsars, GRBs, and FRBs to name a few

For those out there who, like me, don't know these acronyms:

GRBs == Gamma-Ray Bursts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst

FRBs == Fast Radio Bursts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst

There seems to be a giant mismatch about what side is open minded. People who think its most likely aliens think it’s closed minded to assign that low probability, presumably because we’re this tiny corner of the universe. People who think it’s most likely not aliens Think it’s closed minded to assign everything else low probability, presumably because aliens are a tiny corner of everything else.

Is it a misapplication of the anthropic principle to say there are probably gazillions of advanced aliens, given that we appeared and therefore life probably is common? Or is it a misapplication to say it’s probably just another of the gazillions of non-alien things we’ve seen?

It’s all differences of opinion over which claim is the extraordinary one. It is bold to claim confidence about the impossibility of FTL travel, or bold to claim confidence about the possibility of it? Is it bold to say we’re a freak occurrence or bold to say we aren’t? Most generally, is it bold to say we know a lot or bold to say we don’t?

I thought the idea that there are gazillions of advanced aliens has been pretty much disproven by the fermi paradox.

If there are gazillion, at least one out of all the diversity out there should have already colonized the entire galaxy and evidence should be plentiful.

According to the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin the Fermi paradox is solved by the certainty that if an alien civilization announces its presence to the rest of the universe, one of the gazillions of other advanced alien civilizations is sure to destroy it. So they keep quiet.

That would imply the laws of physics somehow dictate the self-manifestation or creation of intelligent clouds of elements (e.g. humans) who by their vary quantum waveform / nature are violent and want to destroy other clouds of elements even if the cost involves harvesting energy from your only local star.

Not necessarily - the laws of physics might merely make it likely enough to be common.

The books and all are nice but the Dark Forest Theory doesn't hold agains much scrutiny. Among other reasons because if that were true we would be already dead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ

I mean - it's called Dark Forest, but if you will look at any documentary, even dark forest is full of life. You will hear crickets, you will hear owls, you may see fireflies.

The theory has catchy name, but even the earth's nature disproves it.

If you read the three books, you realize that the true message is that if you're considered a possible threat to an advanced species, they'll annihilate you, otherwise you'll be left alone. Maybe every other species which knows about us knows we can't even leave our own planet/moon right now, the most we can do is send useless robots to other planets over 30 years.

I haven't read the third book so maybe they expanded on it, but from the first 2 books the theory seemed different. It is far too dangerous to let a non advanced civilization live because they can quickly develop to an advanced civilization.

That's how I understand it: light speed is so slow and technological progress is so fast that any intelligent species could develop the ability to wipe you out faster than you could realize the threat is coming. Ergo, the only possible way to be safe is to destroy other civilizations as soon as they pop up their heads.

I feel like a lot of so-called solutions to the Fermi paradox fail when they speculate on what "aliens" would do. Would they seal us off and make a zoo, or find it morally wrong to contact us, etc, etc. It's bold to assume a single policy, since there would likely be multiple alien civilizations, or multiple factions even if there is only one.

So I give this one more credit in that once you have reached 100% understanding of physics, you will know whether this premise true or not true and it more or less dictates that you answer it if it is true. However, I'm not convinced that with 100% knowledge of physics you would find yourself so vulnerable. And even if you were, it still seems various forms of containment would be just as effective as a genocidal attack.

The very idea "wage wars to be safe" is a bit puzzling, honestly, even animals know better.

> Would they seal us off and make a zoo

This one kind of works because it only takes one civilisation to block us and keep the others out.

> once you have reached 100% understanding of physics, you will know whether this premise true or not true

How does understanding physics give you the certainty?

As a solution to the paradox that would assume that all civilisations are extremely xenophobic and also always assume that collaboration is impossible.

BTW: my current belief is that most likely life is just super-rare (phosphorus problem, and way too many required variables) and also that colonising a galaxy is probably a sub-optimal solution for overpopulation.

The analogy is flawed, doesn't mean it's not useful.

Applied to a forest on earth, you'd have to make the animals are extremely slow.

Why is that? Let's say we've emitted since about 100 years. They are bound by lightspeed like we are. Our wavefront hasn't reached them so far, OR it has, and they are about 50 lightyears away, busy building a slow annihilation fleet, arriving here anytime about 100 years from now, depending on how high up to lightspeed they can go?

>and they are about 50 lightyears away, busy building a slow annihilation fleet, arriving here anytime about 100 years from now,

It's an interesting idea, but it raises the reasonable (IMHO) question, "Why would they bother?"

It seems like an awfully big investment of resources for actions which wouldn't be of real benefit to them.

If your goal is annihilation you don't bother with a fleet, you hurl a relativistic kill vehicle (aka, a hunk of rock or metal) at them.

Nonono! Need to have the holy and heroic enforcers of the righteous path embedded and experience it with full sensorium, to conserve the glory of it for all eternity, and bring it back to be rememberd as it really happened(TM)!

The Killing Star.

Friends trump enemies. Survival of any individual is maximized when working with others. Whether that individual is a cell, a multicellular lifeform, a country, or a multi-system species. Dominating all others is a poor bet compared to being friendly.

There’s a nice analysis of the Fermi paradox out there somewhere that takes into account uncertainties in each of the parameters. As you multiply them together, the uncertainties compound each other. The end result is a big old who knows, rather than a paradox. Our observations are compatible with a really wide variety of realities, many of which include lots of aliens and many of which don’t.

A possible chink is that civilizations just don't do that -- carpet colonize the whole galaxy, or fill it with their probes to the extent that we seem them all over the place. The Fermi paradox relies on material (probes, colonies) and light (signals).

With the material explained away, the lack signals is much easier to explain in that we haven't listened long and we can only hear very loud signals. (Or maybe advanced civs don't use light and use gravity waves or tachyon beams or whatever, but you don't even need to go that far.) The only way we hear a signal is if it's:

1. loud (high energy) and aimed directly at us, like a tight beam

2. EXTREMELY LOUD and aimed everywhere, isotropically

1 is unlikely since they'd have to know where we are; 2 is unlikely since you're talking about an insane level of energy. If it's the case that civs don't seem to be making Dyson spheres or harvesting whole galaxies for energy, being able to throw around that kind of power is prohibitively expensive. In both these cases, the inverse square law applies (for every unit x of distance, the light's x² less bright). Ironically, that means we're more likely to detect signals from an improbably close civilization (like 4 light years next door, in Alpha Centuari), than from farther away -- and even then, by a chance sweep of an umodulated asteroid scanning beam[0] or something, if we happened to be paying attention at the time.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLC1

Do you know if about any simulations of what it would look like if there were alien radio operators?

If there were 50 other Earths scattered around the galaxy (ones that have been broadcasting like us but for longer) should the first television have imnediately picked up interstellar "I Love Lucy" or would it be faint anomalies from SETI? Somewhere in between?

The milky way is 100,000 light years across and I love Lucy is what, 60-70 years old? I would say we've reached a very small portion of the milky way

The inverse square law says no [0]. Even relatively high powered transmitters aren't detectable for an Arecibo-class antenna more than a few AU from Earth. If you want a signal detected light years away you need it to be highly directional. An isotropic radiator emitting enough power to be detected light years away is called a star.

So any SETI signals we might detect would almost certainly need to be intentional. That doesn't mean they would need to be responses to something we've broadcast just the sender was aiming their transmitter towards the solar system and sent a signal.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140719094337/http://www.comput...

> A possible chink is that civilizations just don't do that -- carpet colonize the whole galaxy, or fill it with their probes to the extent that we seem them all over the place

This assumes that there are gazillons of alien civs yet somehow they all come to the same decision. That's much less likely than gazillions of alien civs all make different decisions and it only takes a single one to make the replicating probs or try to colonize.

Maybe there has been some sort of accident of scale, like the intergalactic fleet in Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy that arrives to destroy Earth but is eaten by a dog.

There could be a banging ET party going at the Planck scale and we would never know, they might as well be on the other side of the universe.

The problem with this is that mechanics is not scale invariant. This puts bounds on creatures. Unless there's some crazy different way to compute I wouldn't expect a being to be able to have strong cognitive functions and be the size of a fly. They would also have a difficult time building advanced machinery to get to galactic travel scales. Similarly I wouldn't expect a creature the size of a Brontosaurus to become space faring. Because of their sizes they would have to consume significantly more resources to build simple things. A two story house probably couldn't be created out of wood or other basic biological materials making it difficult to transition into even the stone age. They also require higher food because energy requirements aren't linear. But think how much it costs to send a pound to space. Their first to space would be significantly more expensive.

This doesn't mean these things are impossible because maybe there are ways around them, but it certainty shifts the probabilities by quite a bit. Given our current understanding of biology and mechanics it makes it much more probable for creatures to be within the ballpark of our size (let's say crow to elephant?).

I think this is a mistaken way of thinking in general, because you're omitting time. Your assuming that intelligent/thinking/conscious creatures would necessarily function on timelines that make sense to us. If that were true, then what you're saying makes sense - there are real bounds on how fast you can move chemical energy from A to B, for example.

But I see nothing preventing intelligent life from operating on massively longer timescales. This requires, of course, that you believe that intelligence (and maybe consciousness too) is substrate and timescale independent, which may or may not be a big ask depending on where you stand on these issues.

I think this is strange thinking because it breaks our laws of physics. The clock ticks at the same rate in internal reference frames, it is only different when looking at two different frames. But if you're talking about them acting at slower speeds or faster, then that brings along other problems similar to the mechanics ones we discussed (assuming we're not counting that they are in a slower reference frame). It really shifts the probabilities around. Even trees act relatively quickly because forces act fast. You'd have to be in a pretty extreme environment for other things to happen.

As to chemistry, if they are moving faster then that means that they have more thermal energy. That comes with radiative problems (why humans stand) and this is much more difficult the smaller you are because you have less surface area. Which then puts large energy requirements on intake. And then the inverse is true.

The thing is that aliens would still have to follow the laws of physics. There is no reason to expect that wouldn't be true and reasoning otherwise would take some pretty extraordinary evidence and probably win you several Nobel prizes.

https://archive.org/details/OnBeingTheRightSize-J.B.S.Haldan...

I'm sorry, you dropped a 130 page book with no other comment. Is there anything specific you want to say?

sorry, the relevant part of the book is in the first few pages of the first chapter, where JBS Haldane discusses the physical limits of mammalian anatomy due to load bearing constraints on bone cross sections and hydraulic implications for a heart that must circulate blood/lymph through a gigantic body, and how all of these and other separate systemic envelopes merge to form what we understand as the "right" sizes for living things etc.

Some portion of this chapter is occasionally excerpted to deflate claims about extraordinarily large or small purported alien creatures, though Haldane was setting up an argument for dynamically limited systems in general.

I thought it might be an interesting skim given the similarities to your comment above.

Oh thankyou. This sounds interesting.

Good points, but ...

consider the range of timescales that humans can have effective control over. We manage to organize subatomic collisions that occur in femto-seconds, and we manage to build things that last thousands of years. All this despite the fact that our own lives are measured in units that are several orders of magnitude smaller or larger.

So I can imagine (just about) an intelligent system that can also effectively build systems operating in time domains orders of magnitude from their own experience/lifetimes. If they were very "slow" then certainly launching objects into orbit may appear almost impossibly fast to them. But it wouldn't be notably different than what we do with particle physics (or even firing a gun), where the timescale of the event is essentially impercetible to us, and far beyond our ability to control with our own bodies.

The other way around is harder, because creating things that last much longer than an individual's lifetime has to fall back on culture, and that seems to evolve (change) much more rapidly. There are very few buildings still in use that are more than a thousand years old, even though the physical construction of such a thing is relatively trivial.

> So I can imagine (just about) an intelligent system that can also effectively build systems operating in time domains orders of magnitude from their own experience/lifetimes.

This isn't the problem I'm getting at. The problem I'm getting at is that it'd be highly unlikely for an intelligent lifeform (or really any) to develop under those extreme conditions. Advancing under other conditions and then developing towards extreme conditions after they have reached a sufficiently advanced state is a different issue.

For extreme conditions like operating at a speed much faster to us (imperceptible) would mean that they would be under high amounts of acceleration than compared to us. Gravity already puts major constraints on humans and for a lifeform to be operating at a rate imperceptible to us we're not talking about 10x or 100x the gravity but more like 10^10^10^10 (or more). Mind you that their internal reference frames (their internal clocks) would operate at a different speed than what we see their clock moving at. Subatomic particles have a difficult time operating at a fraction of that gravitational force. That means you have no building blocks.

What you're not considering is that I've accounted for things like chemical processes and electrical processes not being needed. The problem is that I don't know how you get two particles to change state (at least in non-extreme or destructive ways) under the conditions you're talking about. This isn't about "oh we just don't know" it is that there are some things we do know. We know that lifeforms have to be able to change their state (e.g. you can move your fingers or you can have a thought. These are state changes). We know the basic building blocks of the universe, quarks (or at best strings). There's certain rules these things have to abide by. You can let your imagination run wild but there are still limits of what you can do within this universe. And any being even visiting this universe would still be subject to these rules even if they were from a different universe that had a different set of rules. You can't just trash these rules in the spirit of imagination (which btw testing and updating these rules is what the job of a physicist or really any scientist is. But it is still a convergent process).

Creating things that last longer than an individual's lifetime isn't hard at all. We've done it by accident, they are called artifacts. Nature does it all the time, they are called fossils or just dirt. Trees last longer than human lifetimes. I know you think you're keeping an open mind but instead what you've done is limited it. Operating within the bounds of the rules doesn't have to be a limiting process. There may still be an infinite number of configurations under these rules. But abandoning them makes your search space so open (and open in a way where you wouldn't expect to find solutions) that you can never find what you're looking for. It is like if you're looking for needles in a haystack and arguing that the way to find the needle is to add more hay because the needle is inside the hay.

Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)? Or that birds brains are "wired" more dense, like our cerebellum?

I haven't, that's pretty cool. You can update my terrible range guesstimate accordingly. Though that doesn't change the main thesis of there being more likely sizes than others.

Paradoxes are paradoxes precisely because they fail to disprove two contradictory claims.

For the Fermi paradox, the paradox is that the immensity of the universe leading to life seems obvious, yet the complete absence of that life around us seems to show it's not there. So it disproves nothing, but actually highlights the difficulty of disproving either claim given the other.

I never much liked this being called a paradox since it has so many built in assumptions, most of them centered around any given, theoretical alien civilization resembling a human civilization in any way. It's a limitation of what we know for sure, since there's certainly no rule that civilization elsewhere should resemble civilization on Earth. That's an acceptable limitation, it's difficult to notice things you don't know you should notice, but it's a limitation nonetheless.

Of course, it's also possible for civilizations to be so far away that we will like never detect them due to the inverse square law. They could even be in parts of the universe we can't observe.

Every advancing civilization will eventually create an internet. Once they do that, interstellar travel is off the table. Advanced civilizations stay closely packed because they cannot tolerate latency once they get a taste for near instant communication.

Given that serious interstellar travel really requires FTL transport, I suspect that the two are rather closely connected.

Why is FTL necessary for interstellar travel? If you could go even 1% c then you could make journies that are multiple light years on the scale of centuries. It’s not until 50% c does time dilation start playing a significant role, but it would allow making a 10 l-yr journey in 17 years.

Nature doesn’t care if we think there should be aliens or FTL travel. Nature doesn’t like casualty violated and that means we’re all going to be following its rules on the speed of causality. There are no cosmic-scale sentient forces that can shape space-time near us or else we would have noticed in observations decades ago.

I disagree, I think it probably would for humans.. but what about other advanced organisms? Maybe they have very long lives. Maybe their biology is more conducive to 'suspended animation' or some other form of hibernation. Maybe they've digitized their minds and can suspend execution of their thought processes for tens of thousands of years. Maybe their social traits (ant like hives perhaps?) make generation ships feasible while they would collapse into strive for humans.

So Competitive Quake/Counter Strike/ThingsKidsPlayTheseDays:-) will fund research into FTL transport for <1ms ping.

Sadly, I could see it. Some billionaire somewhere wants "The Best" latency numbers and wants it on their yacht...

It really hasn't. [1]

[1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf

Their best future course is to stop sniping at one another.

It is possible that it's aliens. It is possible that it's not. We don't have enough evidence even to estimate probabilities, so anything further is pure speculation. Speculation is a look that wears no better on conservatives than on radicals.

There is hardly a field to be found where young radicals are not promoting evidence for what the tenured consider anathema, waiting for the latter to retire or die and get the hell out of the way. As Max Planck said, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

It is common to insist that the right idea wins in the end, but there is no reason to believe it: every case you can cite in its favor amounts to confirmation bias. The frequency of such examples that first languished for decades, with the original proposer driven from the field, would properly make us suspect that the majority of their also-correct peers remain unvindicated, however many false leads have been exposed. (Hypotheses promoted by women driven from a field make a rich vein of ideas to vindicate.)

Loeb is right about one thing: the notion of "extraordinary evidence" is very destructive. Evidence is evidence. It is always easy to make greater demands on evidence you don't like than on evidence you do, and always easy find excuses to discount evidence incompatible with the consensus of the moment. Every field, to be considered legitimate, should maintain an officially taught compendium of "damned facts", evidence that seems to be incompatible with one or more leading theories. Even when a consensus theory is largely correct, the damned evidence will be the basis of any progress.

Nature doesn't play favorites: it is possible for a consensus theory and all its challengers to be wrong. Evidence against one of the latter is not evidence in favor of the former.

> Loeb is right about one thing: the notion of "extraordinary evidence" is very destructive. Evidence is evidence.

I agree with pretty much everything you're saying except this. Though I still do agree with this a bit. It seems like a shorthand for "be bayesian" that's unfortunately taken too far too frequently. But if I have a strong prior one way or another, I will need stronger evidence to turn me around.

+1 on your main point though. Why can't more people be more comfortable in a state of uncertainty ;_;

Few things in science are more subjective than the relative importance of a piece of evidence.

It is not at all unusual for a key measurement to be wrong, but also not unusual to trust the wrong one.

There are things (think of Higgs boson type) that lie on the limit of observability/detection, for which there isn't any guarantee that there will ever be means strong enough to qualify for the same level of rigorous study as most of the scientists are comfortable with. The easiest thing to do is to draw a line and to dismiss everything that goes beyond it. The smarter thing to do (in my view) is to recognize the decrease of control and accuracy in our means and classify the fields of study accordingly, then both asking and granting different levels of trust to what is being studied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

From the article > A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists.

But the paper cited refers, instead, to the relative safety of the tenured professors to speak out in favor of plate tectonics, vs. the younger researchers who knew that would be, as we say, career-limiting.

Reminds me of Roger Penrose and Carver Mead.

I think it's more that we know human nature, and we can see that people who believe we've been visited by aliens are engaging in story telling, not science.

They're working back from the conclusion they want to be true, when they should instead start by weighing the evidence.

> If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing?

I think what he's trying to convey is that thinking of this object under the assumption of "aliens" pushes us to develop experimental technology to prove it. This could then lead to future advances (whether intentional or accidental) potentially helping us detect alien technology where we otherwise wouldn't be able to had we not begun that pursuit. He's looking at it from a very long-term perspective.

We don't need Oumuamua to push technology further and further. We're already pushing. Now if some aliens showed up on a star cruiser and told us Warp drive is easily obtainable without massive amounts of energy. Then, that would be a new goal to direct ourselves to that could inspire us.

Also infuriating since Sagan was a proponent of long-shot science like SETI and the golden disc on Voyager. He proved that we can be scientifically rigorous and still take chances to explore.

> “It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”

This is either very obtuse or very disingenuous on Loeb's part. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to establish them as true. But that doesn't mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to investigate. You investigate the claims in order to see what kind of evidence there is for them. I would expect the actual peer-reviewed paper, which unfortunately this article doesn't link to (I hate when pop science articles do that), to lay out in more detail what the evidence is and why Loeb thinks it establishes his claim.

> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to establish them as true. But that doesn't mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to investigate.

Even your former claim might not be necessarily true. What constitutes "an extraordinary evidence" exactly?

Example: imagine aliens are freely living among us but our eyes are blind to certain light frequencies (they are in fact blind to most wavelengths) and that's how aliens utilize camouflage.

Would revealing this fact be an extraordinary evidence for aliens? It's IMO extremely subjective. People might get very excited with such a discovery, sure, but the explanation does sound rather bland and super obvious (as all things in hindsight).

So this whole "extraordinary" stuff reads more like popular old men bickering in front of the media for the goals of PR coverage and, who knows, maybe that increases their odds for scientific funding. I'd always look for the financial incentive and potential conflict of interest first.

>>I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct

Listen to his interviews, he is talking about his colleagues at Harvard, not the general public. They are the ones saying things like "I wish it never existed because we can't explain it"

>>it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens".

Again, this is not at all what he is saying. Read his paper and listen to his interviews. It exhibits the signs and being an artificial construct, and he even points to a similar object that was detected that turned out to be a booster launched back in the 50s. You can't easily explain the acceleration of the object with known natural entities like comets and asteroids. It showed no plume nor ejecta, yet seemed to gain speed equivalent to 10% of its mass being ejected. The reason the booster did this was due to the push of solar winds on a thin shell of a hollow object. Hence the theory that this may be some kind of alien solar sail. It does have an extremely odd geometry. The renderings of it being a large turd of an asteroid is pure speculation. There is no clear picture of it. I bet if Voyager 1 made it to another star system it would accelerate also due to its thin surfaces and exhibit the same profile, albeit smaller. And we left a gold disk with our address on it. What if it has technology that we haven't even conceived of? It actually would be worth while for our species to mount an expedition to catch up with it and turn it around. Sounds expensive but wow would it be huge if it was an alien craft.

> If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing?

Chicken and egg problem. We won't know until people are with unconventional ideas are free to try pursuing them without being mocked as "tin-foil hats" or "conspiracy nutjobs" or whatever.

Let's take a moment to remember how many similarly not-at-all-related-to-space travel inventions have been made due to fighting the space race (who gets first to the moon) (like the CDs).

I believe the quote is not a specific evidence for anything. It's a call for us to adhere to a slightly different principle:

"Let's explore, for we are far from knowing everything and we shouldn't mock people who investigate things that to the majority look absurd. They might indeed be absurd but every now and then we make interesting discoveries".

As soon as the article mentioned von Däniken in a serious light I stopped reading. von Däniken is a fraud and embezzlement convict and has admitted to fabricating lots of his fantastical stories and has no place in serious scientific research. I should have expected less from a lifestyle magazine, I guess.

Of course. Even PubMed is ridden with ridiculous stuff. PubMed! To give you an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068791/

Thankfully we can do our own research, see by whom it has been cited, in what journal it has been published, and so forth. You can easily tell that this is quite an unimportant and incredible one. Of course you could tell it yourself after having read it that it is nonsense.

Are there any guides / heuristics on how a layperson can evaluate technical literature?

For example my mother-in-law is starting to micro-dose lithium and cited this article as evidence: https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2020/12/lithium-and-a...

Which cites 19 medical journals. The website itself reeks of bullshit, but how can I tell if the journals it cites are valid or just woo?

Looking at the Impact Factor of a Journal can help but it's not perfect. For example Nature and Science, generally considered the most prestigious journals in the world, have impact factors around 1000 and smaller but still quality niche Physics journals might be in the low hundreds.

The bottom line is that as a Layperson it would be extremely difficult to vet the validity of any given paper let alone whole journals.

https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php

Bookmarking that. Thank you!

I think I was starting to draw that conclusion.

If a claim is in the Lancet, NEMJ, Nature, etc; its probably pretty credible.

If a claim is in another journal; it shouldn't have much bearing on my decision (positive or negative) since I don't have the expertise to evaluate it.

But how do you know those are credible? It's fundamentally impossible to decide from first principles. You have to choose where to put your faith. Longstanding reputation is one popular way, but old things can sell out, or can be fairy tails (like at least all but one religions).

Right but at least Impact Factor gives you some kind of objective idea of the importance of a journal. Most researchers know Science and Nature are elite journals and impact factor at least backs that up by showing that their papers are highly cited by other "experts" in the field. But as I said it's still not perfect.

I am currently working on redesigning the entire academic publishing system which is not an easy task and since because I am alone, it may take an entire lifetime of mine, and it is on hold sadly. I wish someone could take it up with me. I was "squatting" on a domain which is about to expire because I cannot even pay for it. :/ I have no time to work on the design itself, let alone the implementation, because I have to survive on shitty money. I did work on the design quite a lot a year ago when I could afford it, but it has been a while. It would be quite easy to filter out nonsensical articles the way it would work in my case, among other features. I cannot really talk about it on here.

That said, there are lots of "may" in the article. As to why someone is telling you this, well, in this case it is to sell you their products. She could consult a doctor about it. What form is the lithium in? How much of the product (which they sell) is actual lithium? Should look at the studies mentioned where they say "may", so that you would actually have something to base your beliefs on, because "may" is not a claim of "will", and "may" is not "evidence", it is just speculation; they are merchants of hope. The article also does not go very in depth with the comparisons of dose. How much lithium do people get daily and from which sources? Might it turn out that micro-dosing is actually a mere 1/10th of what people already get normally in a day? Keep also in mind, that some regions have lithium in their tap water already. Plus, people believe the news too, because it sounds believable, but this is not about technical literature alone. People do need to get educated about how to critically comb articles.

By the way: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11838882/

> Lithium is commonly found in drinking water and various foods, with dietary intake estimated at 0.6 to 3.1 milligrams per day in the United States in 1985. Lithium supplements are sold as pills, liquid capsules, solutions, and syrups of lithium orotate or lithium aspartate.

This is great info. Thanks for this.

With sites like this, it feels like the citations are a form of DDOS or EULA boilerplating where they could demand naming rights to your first born because they know you won't read it.

A good measure is to see if there is consensus in the literature. Do other papers report something similar? Is this paper widely cited and/or results accepted in more recent papers?

But to begin with, the article you cite is not a proper peer reviewed article. It's merely a webpage on a private website. It's not indexed on pubmed. No one has cited it, nor will they.

Except for his mother-in-law.

examine.com

For the record, lithium as a mood stabilizer is pretty solid and settled science in the realm of mental health, which is actually saying a lot as the only other mental health medication that can really claim the same amount of success in treatment to alleviate symptoms would be amphetamines to treat attention disorders. To this day lithium is considered the gold standard in suicide preventative treatment. There is a lot of research that leads to the conclusion that due to the realities of modern civilization we may not receive enough lithium which in small concentrations is is an essential mineral. While I have not read the article you linked to, it may not be that far off base, but may very well be snake oil, nevertheless, the general scientifically held belief is that there is a strong probability that due to modern society norms we do not receive enough lithium in our diet and that the average human would benefit in metal health from a small boost in lithium in their diet. With that stated it is a good reminder that, you can take too much lithium and an lithium overdose has some nasty side effects. It is really something that should be monitored by a doctor as they take blood serum samples and ensure that you are not running high lithium levels which can destroy your kidneys and other organs.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolutionary-psychia...

I think a more important question is whether or not a layperson should be evaluating technical literature on their own at all. I'm wholly uneducated and unprepared to evaluate even simple medical literature, so I find a doctor who I trust and who can explain why they do the things they do.

There is an idea, especially here in the US, and especially over the last 10-15 years, that you can just "do your own research" and come to correct conclusions about things that have been studied for decades or centuries. You can't. If you want to do it for your own edification, or because it's interesting, by all means. But please not for making real decisions that have a real impact.

Honest question. If your back hurt and your primary-care-physician recommended you see a chiropractor but you saw on wikipedia that chiropractic is pseudoscience with a risk of injury; how would you proceed?

This is a good question, and I'm a little biased in that I do think chiropractic is pseudoscience as medical treatment, but it also feels really good. So I go every once in a while the same way I do with a massage.

I would just tell them my concerns and either ask for why they think that would help, or maybe get a second opinion? It's hard to say for sure.

Hmmm not sure what you mean by your last statement, but either way it seems to be denigrating one of the most respected pieces of print media in circulation today. Though I agree it's not known for its science/technology coverage.

Lex Fridman had a really good interview with Avi Loeb about Oumuamua, among other things, about a week ago. Highly recommend!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcc6E-E1uU

Having watched the vid, he goes into specifics of why he thinks Oumuamua is 'not a rock' based on geometry and reflectivity. It was quite fascinating.

Fantastic episode.

Very interesting, and it gives a really good highlight of the whole Oumuamua event, which got a bit distorted in the media.

The things that stood out were:

- Our range of vision to spot such objects is narrow;

- We don't have much "resolution" of the object, and we have to work with limited data;

- that fact that we managed to get that data was already really good and it's enough to theorize about a lot of stuff, but not enough to tell precisely what it was.

- the object behavior as it approached the sun doesn't match the type of object that we perceived at the beginning;

- the object could have been stationary;

Prof David Kipping did a point-by-point analysis of Loeb's claims:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms

TLDW: most likely a natural object.

Thanks for the link. Always good to hear the other side, especially after listening to the Lex interview a while back. Here's the summary:

Loeb's argument for Ouamuamua being aliens rests on 6 observed anomalies. All but 1 or 2 have pretty reasonable rebuttals.

[1]: Anomaly: There are too few interstellar asteroids to expect something like this, so it must have been aimed at us. The brand new telescope that discovered this was designed to look for interstellar rocks like this, but the fact that it discovered one so quickly is absurdly lucky.

Rebuttal: Most models for interstellar rocks could be wrong. There are some models for interstellar rock ejection however that would put this observation right in the zone of reasonable probability.

[2]: Anomaly: Ouamuamua is flying in a vector called the Local Standard of Rest (LSR) -- it's not "flying" through space, but rather looks like a stationary beacon or 'buoy' (aliens speculation: comms or navigation station). The LSR is basically average orbit around the galactic core -- all local stars are bouncing in all directions, but if you zoom out, on average, everyone's orbiting the galactic core. This average is the LSR, and it's weird that Ouamuamua is right in the LSR range.

Rebuttal: LSR is exactly what you would expect for an interstellar asteroid. Interstellar asteroids are formed early in solar system development, when gas clouds are still condensing into stars and planets. Those gas clouds are traveling around the galaxy in the LSR range, so anything ejected during that time should be in the LSR range.

[3]: Anomaly: Ouamuamua had an unusual orbit and flew close to Earth, so it must have been aimed at us.

Rebuttal: Observational bias. Had it not passed so close to us, we wouldn't have seen it. Given that within only a few weeks it all but disappeared from detection capabilities while still well within the solar system, it could be there's lots of other objects like this currently in the solar system that we just haven't detected yet.

[4]: Anomaly: Ouamuamua is too reflective to be a comet or asteroid.

Rebuttal: Straight up disagreement. Other scientists to point to comets and asteroids that could have that level of reflectivity.

The last two arguments are the interesting ones where the rebuttals are a bit weak.

[5]: Anomaly: Shape is too strange to be natural, but could be a thin solar sail, tumbling perhaps due to being derelict. It was too small to resolve with any telescopes, but by curve-fitting brightness shifts, models suggest it's either cigar-shaped (popular depiction) or pancake-shaped (the solar sail hypothesis).

Rebuttal: It does have an anomalous 6:1 brightness shift every 8 hours, but a tumbling solar sail should have an even higher contrast ratio. If it was a solar sail, it would have to be gently wobbling, not completely tumbling. This is actually what we'd expect from a solar sail (keep it more or less pointed at the sun), but if that was true, we would have expected the brightness fluctuations to even out as it got further from the sun (angles and geometry). This was not observed, so it probably kept tumbling, therefore not solar sail.

[6]: Anomaly: It exhibited acceleration that couldn't be explained by gravitational forces. Comets have this acceleration because a comet's tail is outgassing of the ices that make up the comet, acting as a rudimentary thruster. But Ouamuamua didn't have any observed tail, therefore, solar sail.

Rebuttal: Basically some kind of new comet chemistry that would have prevented us from observing the comet tail. Some gasses would have been hard to observe, or the outgassing was lagged so it started after we would have been able to observe it. Basically, "we haven't seen this before, but there are hypothetical ways to explain this." Science, and astronomy specifically, is filled with those kinds of "we haven't seen this before" discoveries.

-----

This is my summary of the youtube video, which is a summary of a few papers... to go deeper, should probably read the primary sources. I'm also just a youtube watcher, not an astronomer.

In the Lex podcast, Loeb kept quoting Sherlock Homes: "If you exclude all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." My take is all of these rebuttals do seem to include other more prosaic possibilities, so Loeb hasn't really excluded all the other possibilities that warrant the jump to the improbable.

6 isn't an accurate statement of the argument raised here. It wasn't just accelerating, but did so without changing its rotation at all. Comets don't do that when they outgas, the forces torque then about and you get variance in their rotational period.

True, but even if we were say 80% confident in each rebuttal being the true reason chained together the odds of those all being correct is pretty small. Although of course it could be due to alternative rebuttals being the correct ones.

At a certain point in time, not that we've reached it, it starts to look like the ptolemaic system, or luminiferous aether, where you keep tacking on exceptions or explanations to fit the data to your model instead of your model to the data.

After I watched that (love Dr. Kipping) I watched Event Horizon's interview with Loeb, and it raises a cpl items that Kipping didn't address (e.g. the shape is a pancake, not cigar).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D24E4F90HTo

> That Kipping didn't address (e.g. the shape is a pancake, not cigar).

Kipping does mention this in the video, but he says that the shape could be a cigar, or could be a pancake. I don't think there is hard evidence that it definitly is a pancake.

  Such an object would function as a sail—one powered by light, rather than by wind. The natural world doesn’t produce sails; people do.

What about jellyfish that move about the oceans pushed by wind?

(Specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velella)

s/natural world/inorganic matter/

There are also rocks that do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones

They are called "sailing" but they don't sail in the sense of this discussion.

Yeah, I can think of a lot of examples of sails in the natural world. Dandelion seeds, winged tree seeds, etc.

Ballooning spiders as well.

Even some spiders

Flying Squirrels?

I think the comment was poorly worded with “people” and should be “life” which is still an interesting thought.

Distinguishing between things produced by the natural world, and things produced by life seems like the type of communication strategy that would not help a general audience. I mean, I get what you mean, but 'natural' and 'organic' are taken to be synonyms in common usage.

Those are all lifeforms though. And the "sailing" mechanisms have purpose.

The example you are looking for is a lifeless thin slate of ice/rock that gets pushed by a force such as wind or water.

It's a weird statement that confuses the purpose of an object with what an object does. Purpose exists only in our heads; natural objects don't have one. There is no <purpose="sail"> tag attached to atoms.

In other words, anything that behaves as a sail would, can be called a sail. And there are plenty of objects around us that behave as sails, not made such by humans, or made so unintentionally.

Evolution derives purpose from experimentation. It is not intent driven design, it is experiment driven design, but many aspects of persistence through evolution are nonetheless purposeful. If an adaptation is significantly successful, it becomes prominent in the created population and there is a reason for it - that is the noun, purpose. This would be different if you said "have purpose" instead of "the purpose".

I disagree. "Purpose" connotes intent, and evolution has none. It's a glorified random number generator hooked to a feedback loop. The only "purpose" evolution has is in POSIWID sense - the purpose of a system is what it does[0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Or even more fun the idea than some pterosaurs were in fact sailers!

https://phys.org/news/2009-10-ancient-pterosaur-seas-video.h...

I think finding space jellyfish would also be a monumental discovery.

I think by natural world the author meant non-biological.

If the object was biological, then it would be even more support for the existence of extraterrestrial life.

That is a very good example of a sail produced by a non human 'city'. Yep. Same shape and function.

I just started to watch the 1993 series Star Trek new generation. The show has some interesting ideas regarding advanced civilizations vs the primitive ones. One of which is called the prime directive prohibiting any star fleet from intervening with the evolution of primitive people.

In one of the episodes “who watches the watcher” the USS enterprise travels to planet Minkita 2 for a rescue mission and encounters a primitive species of humanoid. By accident, they exposed themselves and their technologies to the people there. Now, those people consider star fleet personnel as god. Without spoiling much, Jean Luc idea to refuse them this thought is interesting and worth thinking when it comes to our scenario here, don’t you think?

(I have to say that I am now big fan of the Star Trek series with Sir Patrick. How could I miss it all those years?)

You should try DS9 when you're done with TNG. It's very different, but still great. I think they're some of the best shows ever made, especially because they didn't tiptoe around ethical dilemmas, they made them a main part of each episode's plot.

Ann, the episode about Commander Data being asked to be dissected for the study of his body? Jean Luc brilliantly relates this idea of cloning the entire android to serve human as a tread toward slavery. They are way ahead of us in time.

The one with the court to determine whether Data is sentient/human or property? Yeah, that's one of my favorite episodes, and where I realized how amazing the show was.

"The Measure of a Man", s2e9

After DS9 (or maybe before it), also take a look at Babylon 5, the show that arguably inspired DS9 and certainly did a lot of things that no Trek show to date has been bold enough to try. It's a bit camp by today's standards, and the first season struggles a bit in places - but the same can be fairly said of TNG, and the depth of B5's narrative and characterization remains in many ways unequaled since its original run in the mid-90s.

I remember watching Babylon 5 when I was young, but I was probably too young to grasp all the meanings. I will rewatch it, thanks!

Oh, do! I also saw a few early episodes as a kid, but didn't really have a chance to get what they were trying to do; it wasn't until years later, when I had a chance to watch the full series straight through thanks to a friend's carefully made VHS tapes, that any of what I was seeing really made sense to me. Nothing since then has even come close to replacing B5 at the head of my SF TV affections.

Reflecting on that experience, I think the major flaw of B5 is that, in structure and intent, it was twenty or more years ahead of its time. Given the handicaps under which the creators then had to labor, it's even more remarkable how much they accomplished - B5 might have been the very first example of what we today call the 'binge-worthy show', made on a shoestring in a time when syndication and time slots and missed episodes were still problems that a show could have. This show overcame them admirably - even so, I can't help but wish a little for the chance to see what the same people could've accomplished today, with the kind of resources available for something like Stranger Things.

That won't happen, of course, not least because the show is niche even by comparison with something like Firefly. For the same reason, even a Trek-style HD remaster is unlikely - a shame in its own right, since the then-revolutionary CGI space effects are by far the part of the show that's aged most badly, and a shame all over again because the creators were looking far enough ahead to shoot in 16:9 and 5.1 surround throughout, which would give an HD remaster the kind of payoff that, if we're being honest, the ones done for old Trek shows never really have.

In any case, it's a small miracle the show got made at all, and another that it ended up being so close to what JMS intended it to be. Anyone who can enjoy TNG or DS9 today can, I think, enjoy B5 at least as well, and on that basis I recommend it without the slightest reservation.

I'll definitely watch then, thank you. As a sidenote, I think that the TNG I watched has remastered CGI. I remember remarking how good the CGI looked for the 90s, and realized/heard later than they redid all the CGI. The new CGI was definitely not out of place, if not fairly good, but I'm not entirely sure that what I'm saying is true. Just mentioning it in case you wanted to look into it.

TMK very little of its effects are strictly new: almost all are digitally re-composited, color-corrected and slightly enhanced high-resolution scans of the original film footage (which used physical models and optical effects), since they were still available. IIRC, planets - as seen from space - are a notable exception (and better for it). It was a major remastering process, with beautiful results. (Although major, remastering cost less (for the whole series) than a single episode of the (IMO) abomination called "Discovery".)

Sadly, such an approach is impossible for the majority parts of the latter series (DS9, VOY) since their effects were mostly CGI, and rendered directly to standard definition video. Further more, many of the 3D models and scenes have been lost, so it would probably require a total effects re-do from scratch (on top of film stock scans), which is "a very costly proposition with questionable (financial) returns".

I saw the originals when they were first broadcast, and have since seen the remasters. The latter definitely improve on the look of the series, but incrementally, and they also suffer from some of the same problem that led the makers of Generations to underlight scenes on, and finally blow up, the Enterprise-D: while TNG's space effects were on par with movies of their time, its sets and props were decidedly not, having been designed with the understanding that SD TV quality would hide a lot of imperfections that would be visible otherwise. Beside that, the pillarboxing necessary to render 4:3 content on a 16:9 display feels really obtrusive these days, or so at least I've come to find it since 16:9 became the standard.

The thing about B5 is that few of its space scenes involve much compositing, since they were all CGI from the start and compositing was hard back then. For that reason, I think a space-effects redo would be unusually feasible for that show, albeit still too expensive for anyone to actually do one.

A harder, if smaller, remastering issue would be that they shot practical effects on video and special effects on film, largely due to that being the cheapest option for both. In standard definition you can't really see the difference, but watching the show today you definitely do.

Agree 100%. What always struck me most about it was the sheer ambition of it - not just the raw scale of the drama, not just setting things up in Season 1 that wouldn't pay off until the very end of Season 5 (if Michael O'Hare hadn't needed to be written out), but getting compelling long-term character arcs (especially for Londo and G'Kar) into small-screen SF for the first time.

If I have one major gripe about the show, it's the way it was constantly padded out with filler eps at a time when JMS's ability to get the core storylines finished was still in doubt. The threat to S5 and resulting hasty rearrangement of S4 meant that the final season didn't hit with the weight it could have done; it felt like an afterthought rather than a climax.

B5 is arguably the best scifi show ever in my opinion. Amazing story, acting, ship battles, and philosophy

„Computer – erase that entire personal log“

This is from the DS9 episode „In the pale Moonlight“. Check Memory Alpha if you want to know more but be aware that reading about this episode would be a massive spoiler if you haven’t watched DS9. Either way DS9 is absolutely recommended.

>You should try DS9 when you're done with TNG. It's very different, but still great.

I'm going to recommend Babylon 5 for this as well. It's not nearly as utopian as Star Trek and focuses on many of the issues interacting with other people/groups/alien species that ST (DS9 does do this, in some respects) generally ignores.

It also doesn't ignore capitalism, greed and general bad behavior like ST mostly does.

You're in for a great ride! Enjoy!

S03E04 for everybody who want's to watch it.

Star Trek and especially TNG is one of the best SciFi series made. The technological point of view is very interesting, but the philosophical issues are even more intriguing and up to date.

It's a shame modern Trek has pretty much abandoned these plots. Trek at it's best is a series of sci-fi novellas, like black mirror with a recurring cast, not the action adventure it's become. Even Picard which was great only really had one concept like this for the entire series arc.

That's one of the biggest problems I have with Star Trek. If we were literally gods by comparison to some fledgling species, the only ethical approach would be to elevate them and cure their diseases and advance their knowledge as quickly as humanly possible.

The ideals behind the Prime Directive were from Vulcan influence. The theory behind it is they tried to do exactly that and it led to disaster in every case.

A lot of scifi shows have been influenced by this. In Stargate SG-1 (spoilers):

The Tollan civilization were humans taken from earth millennia ago that developed science faster than us and ended up being one of the most advanced races in the galaxy. They gave a source of limitless energy to more primitive aliens on a nearby planet in their solar system (think Mars versus Earth) and those aliens weaponized it and blew up part of their own planet. It messed up the Tollan's own planer's orbit, so they had to find a new planet and now don't share any technology.

Just watched that one a few days ago!

I'm just really skeptical that an advanced species like that couldn't figure out the appropriate way to save another species from destruction/stagnation without collapsing everything. Just feels like an immensely negative perspective when we could easily just choose a more positive one.

There are TNG episodes that specifically deal with that, and the problems it causes. I think ENT had a few as well, instances which led them to the creation of the Prime Directive.

I will have to check those out since I've not seen them. I'm open-minded to it, but also pretty confident that the weight of the logic will eventually fall on the side of being good and helpful to others if we ever make it to the stars.

but were we, humanity, gods?

There is always a chance that the Higher Civilization missed something - culturally, scientifically or artistically speaking. Letting such civilization emerge, and help them ascend when they reach certain level seems to be saner and safer approach.

The Higher Civilization might've been stuck in local maxima, adding such random element might let the Higher Civilisation absorb the best parts and move towards another, better local maxima.

You raise good points, but what you're missing in my opinion is that life is precious and finite. And if we can elevate ourselves and other species to a higher state of life and consciousness and even longer life spans, I believe we have a moral obligation to do it. It'd certainly be wise to do it, even if only to have allies against the vast darkness and whatever lurks in it that might hate us or our friends.

“Higher” indicates an ordering. How do you rank civilizations? If we replace “higher” with “more advanced“ it’s still not an obvious thing.

Imagine a race of ultra-advanced aliens were to give us technology that keeps us not only alive indefinitely, but robust and healthy, without disease. Just that one piece of technology. Not even weird weapons like antimatter bombs, etc.

Do you think humanity would suddenly come together in understanding and peace to explore the stars and advance ourselves... or do you think people who already have enormous wealth and power would keep themselves positioned such that their influence and control grows?

Yeah...

We're not fucking worthy of that kind of technology. Neither are any other species.

Its the struggle to acquire knowledge and power that gives you the wisdom to use it for beneficial purposes. This is the whole core of Ian Malcolm's speech to John Hammond in Jurassic Park (the book), but also to a lesser extent, the movie.

We've never experienced this or had the chance to do it, so all we have to go off of are parallels to how we interact with each other. If we did this for others, we'd need to mentor and guide them into the future. If others did this for us, they'd need to do the same rather than just boost our tech and then abandon us.

I'm optimistic that if it happened to us, even in the limited hypothetical you presented, we'd rapidly transform as a species for the better. Now, if that would've happened 50 years ago or longer...not so optimistic.

Well no, but people would be robust and healthy, without disease. And IMO, that's a positive even if all our other failings are still there.

And it would certainly be an improved platform for us to build upon and advance even more.

For the individual, yes, but for society? Death is nature's term limit. Without it we'd be under a Pharaoh with bronze-age ethics.

Unless we figure out how to drastically extend our lifespans or do away with death altogether, although who even knows if it's possible...

>Imagine a race of ultra-advanced aliens were to give us technology that keeps us not only alive indefinitely, but robust and healthy, without disease. Just that one piece of technology. Not even weird weapons like antimatter bombs, etc.

I think that exactly what happened 2000 years ago. Unfortunately we just failed to understand most of the info and it got lost "in translation" due to communication barrier. The good thing is they did promise to return and try again when hopefully our development and ability to understand would get a bit more advanced.

It’s reasonable to try it, but that could also fail quite spectacularly which was the actual justification. Further, their where many examples of such failures. Honestly, I found the idea quite refreshing as it suggests Star Fleet incompetence was the root issue rather than pure ethics. And really understanding the culture, biology, politics, etc of an alien species well enough to be a net positive across generations is an extremely difficult task.

I do appreciate this nuance. If it was primarily because Star Fleet was afraid to mess up, that's understandable. But if I were to see a fledgling species being struck down by some disease or natural calamity, I think in reality it'd make more sense to at least try to save them and elevate them than to just life extinguish that way.

Humans can't manage that on earth.

Not even for other humans, and not just because we can't or won't foot the bill for more education and medication, but also because encouraging relatively primitive tribes to abandon their traditions and join the modern world is widely seen as unethical.

I see no issues with telling tribes or ancient cultures or fledgling species if their beliefs about reality are incorrect. Otherwise those faulty beliefs could lead the species to extinction.

There's education and then there's coercion. The Amish know that technology and modern society exist, and they even participate some for work, but they don't bring it back home, and they haven't altered their way of life.

Coercion is like the Indian boarding school programs in the Pacific Northwest. Taking Indian children away from their parents and beating them if they spoke their native languages, with the goal of wiping out the culture and forcing assimilation.

I'm cool with the Amish method but not the boarding schools.

I'm okay with not coercing someone into something. As long as it's a choice, I see no harm in that. Although ultimately we need to make sure that people are actually educated enough to make an informed choice, and aren't instead so steeped in their incorrect views of reality that they can't make any progress...

What I'm saying can definitely be abused or misinterpreted if someone wants to justify atrocities, but that's their negative interpretation and their choice. The positive interpretation here would be that I'd prefer a choice for anyone who wants to be Amish, as long as being Amish doesn't mean that you're completely trapped in that society if you're born into it. Some ideologies trap the mind.

Thats precisely backwards. Extinction threats on Earth come from the "modern" cultures not the ancient ones.

I would argue that it's not backwards and that your summary is reductive and way too simplistic to be true, but I didn't expand on my view much either to be fair. In general, ancient cultures on earth would have almost always wanted to wipe out opposing cultures, but one side tended to have better weapons. In this case, if the increased moral character of our species over time is any indication then it's possible to become a space-fairing species that just helps others.

Not yet, but we can and I believe we will. That's been the trend of history since we've existed.

see also David Brin's Uplift novels, which deal with this by having more advanced species engage with undeveloped species and be responsible for their upbringing, as it were.

Huge thank you for the recommendation, I love the concept and will check out those novels for sure.

> as humanly possible

There’s some post-colonial baggage to unpack there.

Only if you choose to read that into my comment or to be negative about the future.

Already done for indians. Impossibility of FTL travel just saved all life in universe from you.

What wiped out most of the Indians was plague and genocide while seizing territory and resources.

I don't think plague would be an issue - viruses require proteins to be similar to attach and reproduce, and bacteria require nutrients to be the same. And as for resources? Asteroid mining will get you more water, minerals and metals.

But territory - terraforming might be really difficult or take too long. If aliens need an oxygen/CO2/nitrogen atmosphere and liquid water, Earth could be tempting, even if the plant/animal life is useless to them.

If territory isn't an issue, maybe we'd just be friends or anthropological curios.

I actually think a planet with life already on it may be the worst candidate for territory. Sure, there's unlikely to be a plague that can affect them, but there are millions of proteins and organic compounds on our planet that alien life has never been exposed to before. The odds are high that some substance that is commonplace on our planet has a toxic interaction with the aliens. Even if the aliens have a similar biology to our own (carbon based life with DNA, same cell structure and organelles, etc.) if they use a different chirality of an amino acid you could have tons of potential for toxic interactions. If that is the case, the only way to make the planet habitable is to wipe out all life on the planet, AND break down all of the toxic proteins, at which you're basically doing terraforming anyway.

But yeah I agree that there's very little our planet has that an alien civilization would want. The only reasons I could see for war would be some sort of pre-emptive response ("some day they will be able to attack us, let's wipe them out before they can") or an ideological conflict. Maybe they have a religion/ideology/culture that sees us as needing to be destroyed. Maybe if they see us as a lesser race to be exterminated, like the Nazis. Or maybe we are evil in their morality. There's the sci-fi staple of seeing mankind as inherently violent and warlike, or polluting, but also more exotic things. Maybe they are immortal and don't reproduce, and see us and our potential for expansion as a sort of cosmic cancer. Maybe they are photosyntheic beings, and see anything that lives by consuming other life as a threat. But I think those are unlikely.

At the very least I think that they wouldn't wipe us out on sight. If they did have strong opinions on religion or forms of government, it would likely take years of contact and dialogue to even figure out we were in disagreement. Even then diplomacy and diplomatic pressure would probably be used long before military force.

The trend of our species has been to become more moral and nice to one another. Read up on how humans viewed one another 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago and see the trend. There's no reason to believe or to ONLY believe that we'd be a violent and evil species if we became space-fairing and had FTL travel. In such a far future, I'd like to choose to work towards and to think about having a society that is even more moral than what it is now.

That's ok, in 10000 years when we will think better, we can fly to the stars.

Or even in 10 years.

Check out Iain M. Banks's "Culture" novels for a sci fi society that takes that approach to other civilizations. The Culture tries to raise up every lesser species of aliens to their own level of hedonist, post-scarcity wealth and technology. "The Player of Games" is both a good introduction to the series and an example of their cultural outreach at work.

Thanks a ton, will definitely check those out as I've not yet seen any writing that explores this idea.

>The Culture tries to raise up every lesser species of aliens to their own level of hedonist, post-scarcity wealth and technology.

That's not strictly true throughout the series (I'll avoid any spoilers here), in many situations, civilizations are denied certain technologies by the Culture in the novels.

I just finished reading the entire series and there's always quite a bit of skepticism from both members of the "Culture" and members of other civilizations as to the value and positive impact of The Culture's intervention/meddling.

I'd say that Banks is pretty even handed with that, although he usually seems to fall on the side of "Special Circumstances."

All that said, it's definitely worth the read.

If I recall correctly, even the posthumans in the culture were gatekept by their servant/master AI.

What about the Neanderthal race?

Reading TNG described as a 30 year old series (which it is), but being seen as novel by op has made me feel real old. (I’m just about 40) It’s like when I’m with interns and bring up back to the future....

by 1993 series do you mean the 1993 season? I was confused at first because I thought it was from the 80s and just confirmed that it came out in 87.

Anyway, definitely an excellent show. I watched it a bit as a kid when it aired on G4 and I've been meaning to get back into it.

I watch it on Netflix and the title shows 1993. I am confused as well but I realized that 1993 is the last season. The show itself was in the 80s.

Netflix dates series by their last episode, in a deceptive attempt to make their catalog look fresher.

Interesting, I have never thought of it this way.

Great shows though TNG doesn’t hit its stride until the third season. Don’t give up early. The main problem is too many episodes per season; several are “phoned in” per season.

I loved watching the remastered version on Netflix, it looked better than new.

Second on the Babylon 5 recommendations, it is one of the best sci fi shows ever. Was hooked

Don't people in Star Trek have our culture? But our culture is that of a primitive civilization, which means they are primitive too.

Star Trek definition of primitive is "no warp drive tech".

What's the spoiler-filled version of what happened?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Watches_the_Watchers#Plot

Those that like this episode would also very much enjoy VOY, Episode 6x12, Blink of an Eye [1]. Fascinating premise, essentially a pre-warp society views Voyager as a sky deity, eventually Voyager becomes the raison d'etre for the scientific progress of an entire civilization.

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episod...

I can’t say I’ve ever seen a post on the internet go ahead and explain what the prime directive is before.

Yes, having the prime directive explained on the internet almost seems 'alien'

The most haunting for me was when Picard was stunned and spent 40 years in a few real minutes in a different culture. It's s5e25.

Don't read this wiki page if you don't want spoilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_Th...

I'm willing to disagree with most things I read here.

Entertaining, but way too many assumptions.

He* started with Oumaumua, which I am willing to entertain, and then went way off in other "thought leadership" directions that should all be their own articles.

*Avi Loeb, he. Not Elizabeth Kolbert the author.

*She

*They

She'

Avi Loeb wrote the book and who I am talking about. There isn't ambiguity about whether I was talking about the article writer or the person the article was talking about. Read the article again, there is a particular person talking about Oumaumua and then assumptions about alien natural selection.

In the linked chat with Lex Fridman, Loeb also mentioned how such objects are likely to be zipping by essentially all the time. It'd be great if by the time we spot the next one (of whatever nature) we had a probe/robot/something able to catch up with it (or better, catch it!)

If you can figure out how to generate that much delta V you've solved solar system level space travel.

You can at least put something in its way and if it nopes around it to avoid a collision that’s pretty freaking interesting.

And if it shoots back, that’s briefly interesting too.

closest thing I read was one of these flying right between two fighter jets narrowly missing both, but also seemingly not course correcting or changing behaviour apparently.

Again, if we had the technology to do that it would be amazing.

We can't generate even within a couple orders of magnitude of the acceleration needed to do that.

We probably do have the technology (money is the hard part) to build a telescope array that spans the solar system, and to keep some rockets in standby orbits beyond Neptune. That would provide for earlier detection of an approaching object and a better chance of having a rocket close enough to intercept it.

The volume of space beyond Neptune is absolutely insane, and the speeds of interstellar objects (theoretical speeds that is, we don't have a large enough sample size to draw conclusions about how well that matches actual velocities) are also insane. We're very far from being able do this.

AFAIK, Japan conducted an experiment of asteroid exploration by collision and it revealed chemical composition. But if it's not an asteroid, it might be seen as rude.

There's a huge difference between doing that and doing it with an interstellar object going incredibly fast and extremely far away.

Nah. When it was discovered, there was a talk at JPL on how to intercept it. You can generate out-of-plane motion by slingshotting off Jupiter. You can arrive with it (or rather speed past), but you can't land or sample it with today's tech.

Also, there have been some studies since on it. https://www.kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/constellations/conste...

And lots of people got in on the action with their own studies: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=intercept+interstellar+...

Tangential to the article, but I’m not sure why more isn’t mentioned about what I consider to be the most likely reason we haven’t been visited by aliens: they probably exist somewhere due to the sheer size of the universe, but the speed of light is indeed the fundamental limit to classical information transfer as our current understanding of physics predicts, and therefore we are simply too far away from any sort of intelligence that exists out there to contact or reach us.

It’s a simple and boring explanation but from my perspective also the most likely.

The solution to distance isn’t energy; it’s time. Even at speeds much lower than the speed of light, a civilization could have spread across or explored the Milky Way in a few millions of years. These needn’t have been biological creatures. Von Neumann probes, “Genesis” machines, or just flinging rocks with sensors on them to tour the stars would do the trick.

What would motivate a civilization to undertake such an experiment? A probe a 50,000 light years away would take 50,000 years to send back any meaningful information. Unless alien life-spans are significantly longer than humans, I would think this would probably not be funded by their science department.

A probe of the sophistication of a Von Newman machine, that can reproduce, would be the alien in itself. A network of such probes would be a civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm

:-)

Thanks! I'm going to read it.

Von Neumann probes would be great at asteroid mining. If you just let the probes keep going rather than limiting their distance, they'd cover the 50k light years easily. Not much overhead on the civilization.

They spent 50000 years exploring space, we spent 50000 years waging wars. Who spent their time better?

> but the speed of light is indeed the fundamental limit to classical information transfer as our current understanding of physics predicts

I used to think that as well, but with all of the recent proof of quantum entanglement, I'm not so sure anymore.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/295013-scientists-captur...

My (relatively uninformed) understanding was that you couldn't transfer information via quantum entanglement. Is that not correct?

This is not my field, but it seem if you can spin 1 particle in a known direction and the entangled "partner" particle spins the exact opposite direction, then why not? Basically everything would just be reversed with a 1 being a 0 and a 0 being a 1 on the receiving end. I know both the Chinese and American governments are working on quantum entanglement as a communication mechanism and the Chinese have had some success between satellites. Basically a real time wireless internet.

Edit: better link for Chinese experiments from Science Mag.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/quantum-internet-clo...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-experiment-quantum-com...

https://newatlas.com/telecommunications/us-government-bluepr...

Because you don’t get to choose which way the particle spins when creating an entangled pair.

As others have said, the fundamental problem is that all you can deduce is that whatever the spin of your particle is, the other particle has the opposite spin. You cannot determine the spin of your particle in order to affect the spin of the other particle.

Moreover you can’t transfer information faster than the speed of light.

As for QE: I first I need to send you a particle at sunlight speeds. Then I measure my particle and get the value N, which means I immediately know that your particle must be -N. Great for key exchange: I can send you let’s say 2048 of these particles and then we instantly know each other’s keys/have a shared key, while also knowing if the transmission has been tempered with in transit. But I can’t send you a message I choose.

I don't find the argument that distances are too great for intelligence to meet particularly convincing. At its core lies unjustified extrapolation that the ratio of average lifespan to typical interstellar distance - a pure accident of Earthly biology - somehow extends to the whole universe.

The key quantity on which the argument hinges is

    T * c / D

where T is the average lifespan of the intelligent being in question, c is the speed of light and D is a typical separation between stars in a region of interest.

In our stellar neighborhood there are about 0.004 stars per cubic light year [1], so if we choose to measure D as the reciprocal of the cubic root of stellar density then D is about 6.3 light years which is of the same order of magnitude as the distance to Proxima Centauri (~4.2 ly). This quantity varies somewhat, e.g. global clusters have about 0.4 stars per cubic parsec [2] which is more than 0.01 stars per cubic light year for D of 4.4 ly.

In case of humans, T is about 79 years. We don't know anything about any alien lifeforms, but even among lifeforms on Earth T varies significantly. For example, Bowhead whales can live more than 200 years [3]. Traveling 4 ly at 5% of the speed of light is a possibility for such creatures. Moreover, entities with artificial intelligence could live (function?) significantly longer. Possibly forever.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_density

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular_cluster

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale

>The key quantity on which the argument hinges is

    T * c / D

I'd think that it's also important to have a component that quantifies the lifetime of a technologically advanced civilization, as the universe isn't just separated by space, but also by vast expanses of time as well.

I'm not belittling your example, just trying pointing out that when speculating in this area, it's useful to include a time component related to civilizations as well as an individual lifetime component.

This has been my basic take on it.

However, if you want a point of concern, I'll throw out some alternatives. I'm going to ignore generation ships, because those seem a trifle unlikely (too complex, rather cruel to the inhabitants), but let's imagine some embryo-laden carriers, freeze-dried aliens, and von Neumann probes.

Now, again, that's still a long way for very little gain. There's nothing physical you could bring back to your civilization that would be "worth" the trip, but what about some irrational civilizations? Religious zealots, or just a large enough portion of a technologically advanced society that says, "Screw it, let's hurl some madly self-replicating probes out into the spiral arm." Ninety-nine percent of their civilization might think that is a terrible idea (or pick your proportion), but there only needs to be a few to pull it off.

Why are we not seeing the von Neumann probes? I will admit that the other scenarios are less likely. But where are they? Even at a ten thousandth the speed of light they would have swarmed the galaxy, replicating down one spiral arm, into the core, and back out along the remaining arms.

The solar system is between arms.

I don't understand what is happening with Avi Loeb. I was not familiar with him before Omouamoua but from what I gathered he is a respected academic in the field. So how can someone like that be so disingenuous about this topic?

There is currently basically no evidence whatsoever that Omouamoua is an alien constructs. If we are generous we can consider this at most a plausible explanation among others (certainly not the most plausible), and yet he is just pretending like this is not the case and putting on the front page of his book definitive statements like "The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth", or saying that since all other possible explanation have been excluded (which is categorically wrong) then we must accept the remaining explanation that this an alien object.

What can push an Harvard academic to just disregard any scientific ethic and just go full-on junk science? Is it just a concession to sell more books or gain more fame?

Avi Loeb's work was "validated" by his school's chair of astronomy, so we have to remember that to do science is to mitigate against being human. We all have different standards as to what is science as the anti-vax'ers demonstrate. What is interesting to me is that Loeb's chair notes that the object's trajectory differs from the expected by a statistical difference. While such difference implies a great deal of energy we can't account for, it's a hurdle to overcome in the search for understanding of this event/object.

Here's the chair of Harvard's astro dept.: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/6-strange-...

Have you read any of his arguments? They are sound and nobody has come up with anything substantive to dispute them. Can you offer an actual rebuttal?

Yes I have read them. And don't get me wrong I find some of them interesting. What I consider junk-science and what really irks me is his tendency to just try to suffocate all other possible explanations brushing them off like they have no merit.

As I said, I don't think we should not consider the possibility that this may be alien technology, but the carthesian in me just cannot take seriously anyone that is willing to make such strong claims based on such very little evidence. Science is not supposed to be politic, where you just try to yell louder than your "opponents".

> They are sound and nobody has come up with anything substantive to dispute them.

You can find a very good synthesis of rebutals in this video [1] by Professor Kipping.

You can also find a partial rebuttal in a paper by the very team that discovered Omouamoua [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms&t=240s

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.01910.pdf

The amount of press and public interest he’s drummed up likely encourages young folks to get into the field, raises the profile of the work, and encourages public support of more funding and exploration.

And, since he’s not wrong or right - just exploring possibilities and being imaginative, I think it’s pretty cool.

> just exploring possibilities and being imaginative, I think it’s pretty cool.

I completly agree with that, but I believe you can do that without being disingenuous, as Carl Sagan did.

> since he’s not wrong or right

This is what is written on the back of his book: "Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization."

How is that not wrong? It is even worse than wrong since he is very aware of the other potential explanations, it's straigh up lying.

I've long thought the starseeder hypothesis was a good bet from purely statistical grounds. What are the odds of intelligent life arising ex nihilo? We'd assume infinitesimal.

Given that it happened once, what are the odds that life will successfully expand to other planets? I at least would assume better than it happening independently again, we've never seen autogenesis but we have sent tardigrades to the moon.

I'm imagining two paths for life to spread between star systems.

The first is via intelligent life actively exploring those systems—the purpose or mechanism of that exploration doesn't really matter; life could get there either way. So now you're comparing the statistical probability of abiogenesis against the product of the probabilities of a half dozen unlikely events (roughly, first abiogensis -> cells -> animals -> intelligence -> civilization -> technological civilization -> society stable enough to spread life amongst the stars). This isn't clear cut, but my best guess is that abiogenesis happening twice is rather more likely.

The second is via some form of microbial life leaving the star system and spreading to other stars by accident (whether evolutionary accident or 'act of God'). I think it's possible life could leave the star system by some mechanism and with a ridiculous number of individuals and time could hit other star systems rather than floating in between systems forever. Then it has to land on a planet that not only doesn't kill it, but allows it to thrive. (Tardigrades aren't going to populate the moon.) I'm not sure how possible or likely this would be, but I'm guessing it requires a ton of time (that the universe may not have experienced yet) and, if it were likely, we'd have already found evidence of life on Mars.

> What are the odds of intelligent life arising ex nihilo? We'd assume infinitesimal.

Why would we assume that? We've been seeing biologically interesting chemicals appear from much simpler ones for well over a century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Chemical_synthesis...

Also, your "starseeder hypothesis" sounds a lot more deliberate than panspermia theories, but correct me if I'm misunderstanding you there.

Why wouldn't we assume that? Even with the ability to synthesize full DNA molecules, we haven't yet figured out how to make a living cell from scratch. If our best synthetic biologists still find it impossible to assemble a viable cell while having all the tools to do so in theory, I wouldn't expect it to be likely to happen by accident, barring some quantum weirdness that makes the starseeder hypothesis seem positively banal.

As to deliberateness... I see the difference between starseeder and panspermia hypotheses that in the former; life happened once in a gravity well, became multicellular, figured out a means to escape the gravity well, and then spread throughout the galaxy while in the latter; life happened once in space, drifted a while, got stuck in a gravity well and then figured out how to be multicellular.

I suppose - particularly given the vastness of the places with no gravity wells compared to places with gravity wells - that it's my own gravity-well bias that makes me reach for 'starseeder' hypotheses before panspermia ones. But I think whether life was multicellular before or after the bulk of the interstellar spreading, the instinct of life to spread would be the motive force whatever its problem solving capabilities.

> in the latter; life happened once in space

AIUI most panspermia theories don't posit either of those - definitely not that life originated in space, and not necessarily that it only originated once. The most common variants seem to be that life originates in gravity wells, is ejected by major impact events, drifts through space and eventually re-enters other gravity wells. Simulations suggest that bacteria can potentially survive all of these.

We should plan for another such event should Oumuamua (or another) arrives again. I would find it fascinating to land on such a device where we can place a beacon on it and watch it through space. This may also help Oumuamua (should it be a probe) to also detect a friendly landing on its ship for the remote alien to detect.

How many times has this story been presented over different names and titles?

So much fun ancillary commentary here! Anyway, more good stuff just one step back to an earlier article in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/have-aliens-found-us-...

So what are the odds of us being able to fire something off to catch up with this thing? I feel like I haven't seen this discussed, but presumably if it's no longer accelerating, it should be relatively easy to locate right?

We should at the very least start building out the capability to fire off something at the next mystery rock that floats by.

The odds are zero. It is moving far too fast at 5.5 au/year. Voyager 2 has a speed of 3 au/year and the object will have a 15-20 yr head start before we launch a new probe

On this of all days, I say let's double down on facts instead of crafting our own imaginary worlds.

Regardless of the truth in this specific case, Avi has some very interesting ideas such as the habitable early universe.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613

The article turns rather farcical towards the end... Erich Von Daeniken...

https://archive.is/AyFjv

Worth noting that you can’t conclude time travel is impossible or irrelevant just because other people have. There could exist time travelers who secretly have control either of your life or the world with advanced technology (potentially up to the level of mind control chips) who are keeping the evidence from getting out.

It’s not aliens.

Nothing can convince me that there’s any practical way to travel the distances between the stars.

If you don’t agree then I think you fundamentally don’t grasp how incomprehensibly vast those distances are.

I absolutely believe in life in other worlds but there’s no way to travel from star to star.

Angels vs Viruses.

About 20 years ago I read an interesting theory about how theoretical aliens would look to us if we happen to find them. The theory was that the assuming that there is life other than earth's in the universe, the probability of it being within ±10,000 years of current human development (i.e being similar to us now ± 10,000 years) is very very small. Most likely, life outside the earth will be 20k, 30k or even 50k, or more years in the future technologically, socially and medically advanced.

Think about, how a human now would look like to a human 50,000 years ago. Or how humanity would look like in 50,000 years. For all I know, we will be able to replace every organ (lab tissue growing), live for a LONG time (Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, metformin) and other unimaginable things.

So, if we encountered "space traveling" aliens, their frame of reference would be completely out of our understanding.

I doubt that this was anything but a natural object.

That said, our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. It may take 100k years to get there, but it could be done if we wanted to. Theoretically, sending a tiny probe within a human life time isn't that far out of reach.

I don't think we can discount the general possibility based on our own capabilities, limitations, and motivations. If we were not constrained by our biology, maybe spending thousands of years in transit wouldn't be a big deal. Or maybe a few gram payload is all we need to explore the neighborhood.

>our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system.

Yet we haven't sent anything. Maybe aliens are the same. Maybe they don't have the political will to send anything. Maybe they have their own climate change, or insane leaders to deal with. Or maybe not, maybe they've developed a virtual universe and are living in that instead of exploring the physical one.

I find the assumption that aliens have the same drive or desire as some humans to explore the universe rather crazy. It seems like we want a better versions from the heavens somewhere to tell us, it'll be okay, don't worry, here's the blueprints to fix all your issues. It's easily possible that aliens are opposite, wanting to focus on their issues and fix them rather than looking out to the stars for some hypothetical better version of themselves.

> Yet we haven't sent anything.

But we have, quite a few of them actually, and 2 have left the solar system. It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years.

> It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years.

I don't believe we have sent anything explicitly for the purpose of reaching another star? Right? Exploring our Solar System with probes, sure. Has there been a probe that was meant to explore another star system?

Not explicitly no, but does it really make a difference if it's explicit? Given enough time our probes are bound to pass very close to some other star systems.

If there are other civilizations, it's likely that most of them would be on average 1 billion years older than us, as the average star is 1B older than our sun.

That's a lot of time for a lot of probes to cross many star systems even just by accident.

And yet, stuff does all the time. We see wandering objects enter and leave our solar neighborhood.

It's just a matter of time - perhaps on human timescales its inconceivable. But that's a problem with humans, not with interstellar travel.

Isn't your point of view quite arrogant though?

By arrogant I mean that your POV assumes that we basically know everything (or almost everything) there is to know about space-time.

Sure there is nothing practical that we know of today, but when it took our ancestors 6 months and 50% chance of dying to cross an ocean, going to the moon or sending a probe in outer space probably seemed similarily absolutly impossible to them.

As time passes thinking that we know everything is necessarily less and less wrong, but it's hard to know how wrong we still are today.

"Isn't your point of view quite arrogant though?"

It's more than that, it's outright harmful for our evolution. Instead of "nothing can convince me" and "you fundamentally don’t grasp" it may be more productive to focus on the (however little) probable possibility, i.e. "we haven't found a way yet".

Once upon a time, it was inconceivable that there could be any practical way to travel between continents.

I feel that making this assertion based on our current understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed.

This is a comparison that really doesn’t work.

It takes month in a sailing ship to cross the ocean. It would take thousands of years at the very least to cross space.

So this wouldn't be an issue if you solved the ageing problem - a problem which we are presently working on solving ourselves.

I don't see why it's out of the question that a civilization that's hypothetically a hundred thousand years ahead of us wouldn't have worked out how to suspend themselves, preserve themselves or negate their ageing. Or for that matter, work out how to sidestep the distance argument though some other exotic method that we're yet to discover (i.e. wormholes or some such).

I'm not exactly a proponent for little green men visiting us, but I do think that arguing about distance or physical limits of speed/travel based on our current frame of reference is an incorrect position to take.

To put it in perspective, if the furthest distance man has travelled from the earth is the moon, and we represent that as 1 inch, then the closest star is about 200km / 125 miles away. In such a scale, Voyager has travelled 80 feet.

The distances aren't lost on me by any stretch - However I don't feel that the argument about distance would be as relevant to a hypothetical "class 3" civilisation.

I’m talking current capabilities rather than possible future technological capabilities.

Oh yeah, I get that. I guess my point is that people like to dismiss the idea of extra terrestrials being able to trave the vastness of space based on our own frame of technological reference, even though another race may not be bound to the same physical constraints that we are.

If not, where did our dna come from?

If yes, where does their dna (or the equivalent of it) comes from? You are just kicking the can a bit further.

Somewhere else! Dna is too marvelous for evolution, it cannot have originated here!

And yet we have very good evidence it indeed has. If life originated somewhere else, it landed here before DNA evolved.

What is the evidence? Seems hard to have evidence for anything billions of years ago given we don't have historical records past a few millenia. It is all guesswork past that point, and the patterns of organisms and their complexity makes an earth origin of DNA extremely improbable if not impossible. Try reading through a graduate level book on bioinformatics to marvel at the sheer ingenuity, for lack of a better word, of what our dna is capable of far exceeding anything our best engineers can do. I find it impossible to believe mutation and natural selection can do better, even given billion year timescale and all of history's biomass. Just look at how ineffective genetic algorithms are in computer science.

You can look up origin of DNA there is a ton of good resource, but one of the main reason is that we know all life on earth does not use the same DNA, some domain uses DNA based on a certain set of protein while some other domain uses DNA based on another set, which is very strong evidence that DNA was 'invented' multiple times.

So if the building blocks of life arrived from somewhere else, it was at best RNA not DNA.

But must of all I find your reasoning puzzling, you find DNA marvelous (which it is) and thus assumes it must have come from somewhere else. What does this 'somewhere else' has that we don't have here? The Universe is relatively homogeneous.

No idea where it came from, but if someone found a computer in the middle of the desert and said it evolved over millions of years, I would be doubtful. DNA is many orders of magnitude more finely adapted and complex than computers, and to boot does much more with 6GB than our best coders. It is just inconceivable that random mutation and natural selection can do this. Just try your hand at a genetic algorithm to see just how incapable they are.

Anyways, just because we don't have a good explanation is no reason to substitute an obviously false explanation. That would be just as bad as creationists saying God did it, since both shut down looking for better ideas.

> No idea where it came from

Yes that's why I am suggesting you go read some research about it from people that know a thing or two about the subject.

Just because you personally, with an outsider perspective and no specific knowledge about this field, have a tough time believing DNA could have evolved here does not make it so.

The state of our understanding stops at RNA not at DNA. So if something came from somewhere else, once again, it was RNA. You don't get to draw the boundaries of what we know and don't just based on your gut feeling and cheap analogies.

I have researched the topic extensively, and no one has any idea. It is all just speculation that fails when you try reducing the ideas to practice.

Can you recommend what you consider hard evidence?

The answer is no

I watched Ancient Aliens so clearly the answer is Yes

Many people have seen them so near that there's no possible way it's a misidentification. For example, standing in the same room, indoors, in their homes... or outside in groups with many other corroborating witnesses (Google "Ariel School Zimbabwe mass sighting"). They're not all lying. In fact, if even just 1 is true, then yes we are being visited by aliens.

I did not search for it yet, but "Mass psychogenic illness"[1] is a thing. From Wikipedia: "Mass psychogenic illness (MPI), also called mass sociogenic illness, mass psychogenic disorder, epidemic hysteria, or mass hysteria, is the rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group, originating from a nervous system disturbance involving excitation, loss, or alteration of function, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic aetiology.".

There also have been mass hysteria cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

I would also like to mention "Folie à deux"[2]. From Wikipedia: "Folie à deux ('madness for two'), also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transmitted from one individual to another.".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux

Many people genuinely believe they have seen Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster (almost entirely disproven at this point), magic, and miracles happen before their eyes.

It doesn't make it true.

The problem is that in the past you had corroborating evidence for gods, demons, angels, witches, etc. until "aliens" became the socially acceptable "unexplained thing."

If those "interpretations" weren't correct, there is very little evidence that "aliens" is a correct interpretation and that future generations won't have a different one.

In addition, the one thing that we now know scientifically is that "first hand observation" is notoriously unreliable.

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